Following my recent STC Webinar on Every Page is Page One, an attendee wrote to ask about the discipline of linking. Unfortunately, that email mysteriously vanished from my inbox before I could answer personally, so, whoever asked, I hope you see the answer here. Linking is important to Every Page is Page One and to a bottom-up… Read More »
I got a number of really good questions following my TC Dojo session on Bottom-up Information Architecture (below). I want to address the questions in a little more depth than was possible in the webinar. Q: I’ve attended multiple Every Page is Page One webinars. They get bogged down in theory but never explain what tasks… Read More »
Last week I wrote about the death of hierarchy as the dominant form of content organization. One of the comments on that post asked me to “comment on the different perspectives between this blog post and “Search is not enough” by the Nielsen Norman Group?” Let me get the central question out of the way… Read More »
As readers and content both go increasingly online, findability becomes an ever greater concern. The organization of content therefore becomes more and more important. Content can’t be effective if it is not found. There are three components to content organization: classification, relationships, and stickiness. Traditionally, we have focused most of our effort on classification as a… Read More »
Much of the time we spend with technical documentation is concerned with wayfinding. That is, it is not about performing the actual operation, but about finding which operation to perform, and finding the piece of content that describes the operation in a form that we can understand. Note that there are two distinct components to… Read More »
Summary: Writers worry about whether links will distract users. To discuss this concern, we need to begin by distinguishing between imperative links that command the reader to click and passive links that merely make finding ancillary material easier. Tom Johnson wrote a post recently in which he raised an important question about linking, and referred… Read More »
What is the right word to describe a node of a hypertext? What should we call the basic unit of information that we present to readers? Is it a page, a topic, or an article? (I’m going to take it as read that the answer is no longer “a book”. If you disagree, that’s what… Read More »
Why does help still kind of suck even after so many years? Tom Johnson asks this poignant question in his post Do We Need a New Approach to Help? Why Are Users So Apathetic Towards Help after 50 Years of Innovation? Tom provides a great survey of the trends and ideas in help design, starting with… Read More »
Findability is a filtering problem. There is a whole whack of stuff on the Web. To find what you want, you have to filter it. So if you can provide your visitors with a more sophisticated filter, such as a faceted navigation or a taxonomy-based browsing experience, they will have more success finding stuff, right? Not… Read More »
The most important thing you can do to organize your Web content so that people can find it is to make it sticky. Making it sticky is more important than categorizing it or placing it in a hierarchy or taxonomy. It is even more important than linking your content set effectively. In fact, if you… Read More »